Watched Forrest Gump for the first time in 20 odd years this evening. Watching it again with an adult brain...Jenny is a real bitch! Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Watched Forrest Gump for the first time in 20 odd years this evening. Watching it again with an adult brain...J...

The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may benefit even if you don’t use w64devkit. I’d like to touch on the various odds and ends from the past year. Release security In April I announced that release packaging is now signed . Today...

The following are my notes on discrete-time Fourier series (DTFS), as well as the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT). These topics serve as an important theoretical underpinning to the digital processing of signals by computers using the DFT (which will be covered in a future post). For discrete-time signals, we use the square bracket notation to denote samples: x[n] is the n-th sample of signal x . We’ll say that a discrete-time (just discrete from this point on, for brevity) sig...

AI-generated text often carries invisible markers that most people never notice. These hidden watermarks — embedded by tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and others — can flag your content as machine-produced, which matters if you’re publishing professionally, submitting academic work, or building a brand voice that needs to feel authentically human. Here’s how to find those markers and strip them out. What Are AI Watermarks and Why Do They Exist? AI watermarks aren’t visible...

This blog is part of a series exploring the technologies and principles shaping the future of simulation. A program office asks a fair question about an autonomous aircraft. How will it learn to handle a specific threat, in a specific place, against a specific sensor picture, when its link to the operator drops? Not in a demonstration. In the conditions the mission will actually present. The honest answer is that the data required to teach that does not exist yet. That answer sits strangel...

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in productivity - and thus the products we could rapidly build. On the other hand, I’m fearful of the damage AI might cause: agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure, designing bio weapons. But, back on my first hand, LLMs might also design miracle cures, and come up with clever ways to raise our prosperity. Fundamentally I don’t...

I feel kinda stupid for even saying this, but it’s probably worth saying anyway: companies are not people. Companies don’t make decisions. Companies don’t decide who they want to donate money to. Companies don’t feel shame. Companies don’t learn from their mistakes. Companies don’t have political orientation. Because companies are legal entities, they're a bunch of papers, letters and numbers. That’s what companies are. When you’re mad at a company, figure out who is actually ...

I’ve heard a lot of talk about LLMs recently, and among the most common topics of discussion have been the comments. LLM comments generally seem to suck: they are verbose, regardless of surrounding context, they seem to encode conversation decisions (like “do it this way, not that way” [note: In my head, I've been calling this "comment hysteresis", because the comments are not a function of the final design, but of the path taken to get there. ] ), and they tend to use made-up vocab...

Recently, I looked at how AMD made its chips 50% faster within a span of two years, in How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? Many people asked me to cover Apple processors. So let us go. Consider the base Apple Silicon chips: M2 (2022), M3 (2023), M4 (2024) and M5 (2025). I am skipping the original one (M1) for simplicity and I am not considering the Pro and Max chips. The M6 is out there too, just released, but I am going to cover it at the end. On Geekbench 6, performance went u...

I’m talking in the context of industrial programming . A few statements I believe to be true: If you aren’t doing it hands-on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely wrong . Being influential doesn’t automatically make you right. Talking about coding and delivering software under real constraints are two very different things. Before clicking on a programming video, it doesn’t hurt to check the creator’s credentials. Yet we keep listening to influential p...

I'm back from VCF Midwest 21 , arguably the largest vintage computer festival on the planet. After being blown away last year, I decided to get a table of my own this year, to demonstrate NTP Time on a bunch of old Macs, representing every era up to the pinnacle of the PowerPC, an Xserve G5 (serving duty as a Stratum 2 ntpd server). Attending as an exhibitor is a lot different. In some ways better (I got to interact face-to-face with at least 200 people—after that I ran out of ...

Finding Bugs Sep 19, 2026 Are generative (randomized) tests significantly more effective than example-based unit-tests at discovering bugs? There’s an interesting discussion about this on lobste.rs . One argument in favor of unit tests is, paraphrasing My generic fuzzer wasn’t able to find this tricky bug in Rust regex crate. To me, it seems that generative testing should shake out that particular creature, so I wrote a lil fuzzer of my own, and it indeed discovere...

Introducing composable, module system native and agent friendly command line tools for modern Java development By Danny Thomas, JVM Ecosystem Team Recent work on the Java language to pave the on-ramp has made it easier than ever to start a Java program and evolve it using the full language and platform. At the end of that on-ramp lies Java’s mature build and dependency management ecosystem, capable of carrying software to enormous scale and complexity. That ecosystem reached its maturity by ...

0.0 Context setting A really short one today (fine, maybe not, at over 1,200 words). It’s Wednesday 16 September in Portland, Oregon, where it’s unseasonably warm and it threatens to continue to do so through the end of the week. 0.1 How People Work, Live Last episode was with Dana Chisnell and we had a great candid chat about small-p politics at work. I especially loved her framing about how soft skills are actually power skills. Dana’s episode is up on the podcast and YouTube n...

I’ve been doing some spring/fall cleaning and found an unpublished follow-up component to (a web component to “snow” on your website — which also happens to work with emoji too). Originally it was created as an easter egg for Blog Awesome (click on the Font Awesome flag in the very bottom of the footer) but others have wanted to use it for more things! Presenting: : Demo Source code on GitHub It’s in use on this page (if you are on my web site and not in a feed r...

I had the idea of writing about writing, more specifically handwritten content, and figured what better means of making a post about it than one consisting of handwritten scans. Be forewarned, being handwritten, there’s quite a bit less polish on my already rambling and disorganized content. If you can’t read my handwriting - be it because of a screen reader/accessibility need, the amount of data the page takes up, or just because it’s rather illegible - there is a Claude powered transcrip...

Soap Bubbles by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housing and Cities Halina Bennet on what she’s learned from a year of covering housi...

Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to be worse at shipping. Ira Glass has a classic quote about this. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the t...

In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were studying graphs, which are collections of points (called vertices) and lines (called edges). Graphs might represent anything from social groups to the internet to neurons in the brain. The mathematicians hoped to understand properties of one type of graph — a type that’s ubiquitous in mathematics and computer science… Source In 2004, two mathematicians hypothesized a powerful kind of sandwich. They were stud...

Hello, Join the huddle, while I regale you with more tales of the Penguin... Factorio on the Steam Frame raiguard When Valve originally announced their next-gen hardware , I was very excited for the Steam Controller and marginally excited for the Steam Machine, but I wasn't very excited about the Steam Frame. I have had the opportunity to play VR on my friend's HTC Vive; and on the occasions where I visit the Wube office in Prague, I have played on the company's Valve In...

Gracious gray amid the blue & bright Surreal silver against the night Sometimes an uncanny crescent or a gibbous glow in ascent Other times a hollow halo or a cloud glow Reflective and rolling, when near Stony stark skyline, when on it Cosmic microcosm , when held Enticing enigma , when leaving behind This is our monumental Moon, always around for a nature profound to be found Always around, always around for you no matter the morning it mourned through. Our Moon shining through tree branches i...

ITMS 2026 Two years ago I attended the International Manufacturing Technology Show  in Chicago's McCormick Place and found a rather limited focus on artificial intelligence among the exhibitors. ITMS is back in town so I went again this week. A quiet respite from all the AI/math angst, though that will come in full view when mathematicians take over the same venue in January. I picked up my badge, the last to say "Illinois Tech" as I registered for a free academic pass well before the lay...

This week I was writing a story and noticed something strange: I didn’t give the document a title, but, after saving it, the document had a title that I did not expect. If I don’t have a name for a story yet, or if I am doing free writing, I will often not give a document a title, instead allowing the default behaviour in the tool I use to write, Typora , which is to take the first few words or maybe sentence of the document, or the first line. In the case of markdown, the first line is alm...